The Trigger of Conscience (Detective Story serial)/Part 1
[PART I]
CHAPTER I.
Mr. Grant Invites Criticism
The golf course of the Broadlawns Country Club lay basking in the mellow sunshine of a late September afternoon. Vivid coats and sweaters made bright splashes of color, and the striped awning of the marquee upon the lawn challenged the eye as defiantly at the commencement of the season. But the stout, white-haired old gentleman on the veranda shivered and tugged at the collar of his too youthful sport coat.
“Hello, Sowerby! Been around to-day?” A cold, rather gibing voice sounded just behind him, and President Sowerby of the Tradesmen's Bank turned irascibly in his chair, and the gaitered foot, which had rested carefully upon the veranda rail, slipped to the floor.
Just behind him stood a handsome man of about forty. The telltale lines about his shrewd eyes and the curious patch, like a white postage stamp, in the dark hair above each ear, only added to an engaging countenance.
“Confound you, Bowles!” Rutherford Sowerby exclaimed as he recognized the newcomer. “Why do you sneak up on those rubber soles of yours like a stage detective?”
He paused with a snort, and the other, in the freedom of old acquaintanceship, laughed and perched himself on the veranda rail. “Sorry I startled you. Little touch of the gout to-day?” he asked with half-bantering sympathy.
“No, it isn't!” the old gentleman lied bravely. “I'm waiting for my wife; never knew a woman to be on time yet! How was the market? I didn't run into town this morning.”
“Pretty steady,” the broker responded absently, his eyes upon two figures, which, unseen by his older companion, had started around the corner of the veranda. One was a young woman not yet out of her twenties, pretty in a fluffy, colorless, rather insipid fashion, and the other was a slightly older man with a dapper little blond mustache and prominent light blue eyes.
The couple halted instantly, and the woman flushed and made a slight, almost imperceptible motion of dismissal. Her companion, accepting his dismissal, disappeared around the corner of the veranda, and she came forward biting her full lips. Bowles, the broker, smiled inwardly at the incident. The woman was Sowerby's young wife, and Philip Dorrance, treasurer—popularly known as “husband”—of the Farr Rubber Company, had been her companion. Ogden Bowles raised his voice slightly and added in his bantering tone: “There wasn't much movement on the Exchange, but rubber seems to be booming. Good afternoon, Mrs. Sowerby!” He rose, and young Mrs. Sowerby flushed—as he had meant that she should—and darted a venomous glance at him.
“Good afternoon,” she replied sweetly. “Have you met the new secretary of the club—the one whom the committee engaged to succeed poor Mr. Martin? Mrs. Carter says he is rather a grouch, but I believe he refused to advance her any money this afternoon to pay her bridge debt. He told her that her account on the books was already quite heavy for this month, and, being a new man, he couldn't take the responsibility without consulting the secretary of the club, Mr. Estridge.” She smiled and turned to her husband. “Have I kept you waiting, dear? I stopped for a minute to speak to the Frasers and Mr. Dorrance. They were watching Gerald Landon and Miss Dare finish their round.”
Bowles' face had darkened for an instant at her thrust at Mrs. Carter. Ignoring her remark about the secretary, he repeated, as he prepared to depart: “Gerald Landon? That young friend of the Frasers? I hope he shows up well later in the tournament, for he's made the only decent scores here this season. By the way, I understand he is the assistant cashier at your bank, Sowerby? What we need here is young blood to put some pep into the game. I am sure a golf enthusiast like yourself will agree with me. Please save me a fox trot at the dance to-night, Mrs. Sowerby.”
As the broker moved away Sowerby thundered at his wife. “What we need is less of his cool impudence around here,” he said. “What business is it of his how enthusiastic I am about his infernal golf, and what business have you to interest yourself in that Carter woman's debts?”
“Just—because,” Maud Sowerby responded.
“Gad, it's the sort of thing a man wouldn't have mentioned! Commend me to women for making a country club a hotbed of knocking and backbiting and general cattishness!” Her husband stamped his gouty foot and then swore vigorously, but her equanimity was not disturbed.
“Go on, dear! You've called me the name of about every other animal in the menagerie, so I may as well be a cat, too,” she observed.
His fat face flamed in mounting, apoplectic rage. “Cats aren't in menageries! They're in back alleys like the one you came from!” he exclaimed. “Stop that infernal tapping on the rail with your fingers. You're no longer at the typewriter where I found you when I was fool enough to marry you!”
Maud Sowerby's breath drew in with a little venomous hiss, but the nervous tapping of her fingers ceased obediently. She was as much ashamed of those stubby, thickened fingers as of the plebeian origin with which the irascible old man always taunted her when his gout got the better of him. The next moment she rose lightly from the low wicker chair.
“I think I'll join the Frasers.” In spite of herself a little sharp note had crept into her tones. “This constant washing of dirty linen in public, my dear Rutherford, really ought to be confined to back yards where alley cats congregate!”
As she left him the old man chuckled in vicious glee. He was still chuckling when a tall, slender, distinguished-looking, gray-haired man of fifty, after a word or two with the club steward in the doorway, approached him.
“Hello, Rutherford! Have you met the new secretary of the club?” His voice, though confidentially modulated, was suave and resonant with the notes of a trained orator, and the smile, with which he met the eyes of the bank president, was the diplomatic one which had overcome the prejudices of more than one difficult jury in a celebrated case.
Rutherford Sowerby grunted. “'Lo, Sam! What's all this about your infernal secretary? Haven't I always maintained that this club was too small to need a salaried one? Aren't you the official, duly elected officer in that capacity? I never did see why the steward couldn't keep the tuppenny monthly accounts and bring them to you to be ratified without any intermediary.”
“Yet you were one of the directors at the last meeting who instructed the chairman of the house committee to ask me to find a man for you.” Samuel Estridge's tone seemed not to have changed, but it held a quality which made the older man eye him more keenly. “I think you'd better come along and have a look at him.”
Without another word Sowerby hauled himself out of his chair, and the two strolled into the clubhouse. They proceeded at once to the secretary's office on the other side of the staircase from that of the steward.
Here they found a stocky man of indeterminate middle age, with a shock of sandy hair as heavy as a wig and thick-rimmed glasses beneath his eye-shade, poring nearsightedly over a ledger behind the desk. In front of it stood a stout, majestic, elderly woman with a high, bony nose and piercing dark eyes that glared across the counter through a short-handled, diamond studded lorgnette.
“I am positive that there is some mistake!” she was saying in frigid, dominant tones. Then, as she caught sight of the newcomers, she turned to the lawyer. “Mr. Estridge, I really think that Mr. Martin, no matter how ill he was before he went West, ought to have gone more thoroughly over the books with your new Mr. Grant here. I am certain that my personal account is incorrect, and, although I do not wish to go so far as to lay it before the board”
“My dear Mrs. de Forest, this is Mr. Grant's first day in active charge, you know.” The lawyer's voice was as winning as his smile. “I promise you that I will give him my personal assistance and look into this matter at the earliest possible opportunity.”
Cutting short the lady's effusive declaration that she would not dream of troubling him and had no doubt that the trifling affair would adjust itself, he led her adroitly into a discussion of the afternoon's bridge game. Presently the dapper, blond, young Mr. Dorrance appeared in the doorway and, with the conciliatory little cough he usually reserved solely for addressing his own wife, announced: “Mrs. de Forest, I have been looking everywhere for you! Josephine and the Frasers are waiting tea, and they wouldn't dream”
The social arbiter of Broadlawns smiled graciously. “Of course! I'll join them at once. How stupid of me!” With an inclination of her elaborately coiffured gray head to the others she departed in his company much after the manner of a huge liner with a fussy little tug. Sowerby growled in an aside to the lawyer: “Wish she would lay something before the board, as she's always threatening to do, while I'm present at the meeting! What I'll do to it But your man here does seem to be—er—going a bit farther than Martin. I hear he disputed Mrs. Carter's credit.”
The shock of sandy hair had not raised itself an inch from above the ledger, and Estridge stepped quickly forward as though he, too, had not heard his companion's remark.
“Getting on to the work all right, Grant? Mr. Sowerby, this is Mr. James Grant, who will look after the books for us in place of Mr. Martin. Grant, this is Mr. Rutherford Sowerby, president of the Tradesmen's Bank in New York and one of the directors of the club.”
The new secretary of the club acknowledged the introduction with just the right shade of deference and then replied io the lawyer's question: “Yes, sir, I think I shall get on to the work in time quite satisfactorily. Murdock has been assisting me to-day in his spare time.”
“'Murdock?' Yes, I'm sure you'll find the steward very helpful, and there is no reason why you shouldn't delegate a lot of the minor accounts to him, Mr. Grant.” Samuel Estridge turned away. “You needn't stay cooped up in here all the time, you know. Come on, Rutherford, I've got something better than tea in my locker!”
Young Mrs. Sowerby appeared in the door of the office. “Rutherford, the car's waiting, and you know you ordered it for five o'clock.” She spoke hurriedly, and her eyes shifted as though, strangely enough, she were trying to avoid meeting the gaze of the man behind the desk. “How do you do, Mr. Estridge? May we drop you at your place on our way home?”
“Thanks, I'm staying on here a little longer. Have you met our new house secretary, Mr. Grant?” Estridge was watching her curiously, and he noted the quick, uncontrollable flush which mounted in her face.
“Yes, I—I've met Mr. Grant.” Her eyelids fluttered and fell, and then she turned quickly to her husband. “Rutherford, Whitcomb says that the batteries”
With feline cleverness she had scratched upon a spot already sore. “Whitcomb's a fool!” Sowerby charged for the door. “See you to-night, Sam. This is your fool nonsense, Maud, in wanting a bullheaded British driver because he looked swagger. Swagger, my eye! Now he wants the earth! Don't I know the batteries of that car?”
His voice died away upon the veranda, and Estridge turned with a little shrug to the new secretary, but that worthy had bent once more over his ledger, and the lawyer strolled out.
In the rotundalike entrance hall, where, as upon the veranda, cozy little groups were having tea, he came upon Ogden Bowles deep in conversation with a tall, willowy woman, whose rich red hair was drawn down over her ears like a Madonna by Raphael. He would have passed them with a smiling nod, but the broker stopped him.
“I say, Estridge, do sit down for a minute and amuse Mrs. Carter. I've got to see the secretary, and I am afraid she will run away from me! I have been trying to persuade her to dine with the Dorrances and me at the Mayblossom Inn—I'd ask you, too, but I know that you are booked already, unfortunately—and I'm not having any luck.”
“Don't try to amuse me, Mr. Estridge—all the men do that—but take this chair by me and satisfy my feminine and trivial curiosity.” Mrs. Carter had large eyes of a peculiar golden brown, and she knew how to use them, There was nothing for the attorney to do but to acquiesce, and he dropped into the chair indicated, as Bowles bowed and turned toward the little office.
“Anything that interested you sufficiently to arouse your curiosity could not be trivial, Mrs. Carter,” he murmured mechanically.
“That isn't worthy of you, Mr. Estridge,” she replied. “One might expect that sort of thing from Phil Dorrance, perhaps, if his wife were not within hearing, but not from our most noted criminal lawyer.”
“'Criminal lawyer' sounds ambiguous, doesn't it?” he said. But, seriously, you have aroused my curiosity by declaring that you have any. I have always looked upon you as one woman devoid of it.”
“It isn't very active.” As she spoke Mr Carter's glinting, topaz eyes shifted from him to the tiny office at the right of the broad staircase. “Tell me something about the club's new secretary—Mr. Grant, isn't it? He seems to be rather an unusual individual, not quite like a mere clerk.”
“He isn't.” The attorney spoke easily enough, and his tone had sunk to an even more conversational level, but he eyed Mrs. Carter's profile, clean cut against her banded, straight red hair, with a shrewd glimmer of speculation. “I believe he held a more superior position of some sort, but he has accepted this until Martin's return because he is so keen on golf. He won't be tied down to the office since Murdock can do a lot of his work. You've met him? I hope he hasn't been officious about the accounts or anything? These men who feel superior to their positions so often are dictatorial.”
Mrs. Carter laughed lightly, and one of her long, white hands gripped the air arm until the wicker creaked. “Oh, dear, no! I never bother about my club accounts except to write a check for the total at the first of the month without even glancing over my slips. I'm such a bad business woman! But, when I went in to ask this Mr. Grant some trivial question or other, a little while ago, he seemed to mistake me for some one else and was so politely incredulous about it that it rather amused me. I'm sure I never laid eyes on the man before, unless he has waited upon me in some shop or bank. What did you say position was previous to his coming here, Mr. Estridge?”
Her tone was a bored, idle one, but, as she moved restlessly in her chair, the attorney caught another glimpse of her eye and their eager, almost defensive, light did not accord with her manner. Was it fear that he read in—the same fear which had covered the less well-poised little Mrs. Sowerby with confusion?
“I didn't say, but I'm quite sure he has never waited upon any one in his life,” Estridge replied deliberately. “I understand he was the confidential secretary for some very noted personage.”
“For whom?” A crisp voice behind him made him glance over his should to see that Ogden Bowles had returned. In the usually debonair broker, too, there appeared a slight, but significant change. The fine lines about his eyes seemed to have deepened, and his lips were set. “Who is this fellow, Grant Estridge? You'll forgive me for overhearing a part of your conversation, but it was unavoidable. The man seems rather a dub to me.”
“Oh, give him time, Bowles; this is his first day, you know.” The attorney laughed good-naturedly, but in his mind a curious question was forming. “I don't know for whom the chap was confidential secretary, but if you're interested I don't doubt that I can find out from the house committee.”
“I'm not sufficiently interested for that, thanks.” Bowles laughed also, but rather shortly. “Mrs. Carter, is it to be the Mayblossom Inn?”
She rose with a slow shake of her head. “So sorry, but I find that I have a slight headache, and, if I am to return for the dance to-night, I must rest. I'll let you run me home to my little cottage, though, if you like.”
After a final word or two with Estridge the couple moved off down the veranda steps, and the attorney sank back in the chair from which he had just arisen, but he turned it so as to face the door of the little office in which the new secretary had been installed. What was the matter with Mrs. Sowerby and Mrs. Carter and Bowles? Could it be his own imagination, could his nerves have gone back on him after that last big, grueling contest of wits in court, or was there really something strange and sinister underlying the tranquil surface atmosphere of this little club of suburban acquaintances—greater even than he had conceived in his knowledge of their petty affairs?
While he sat there lost in reverie Murdock, the steward, approached. He a man of forty-odd with a slight ouch of gray at his temples and the expressionless face of the perfectly trained servant. Absently Estridge ordered a lemonade. When the man brought it he remarked: “Murdock, Mr. Grant says that you have been helping him to-day with the accounts which Mr. Martin left unfinished.”
Murdock coughed. “Well, yes, sir,” he murmured. “Having a little spare time and knowing the books from going over them with Mr. Martin, I thought it was what the house committee would wish, sir.”
His tone was apologetic, as though feeling that he had overstepped the bounds of his appointed duty, but Samuel Estridge nodded approvingly. “Quite right, Murdock. Take as much off Mr. Grant's hands as you can, especially at first. You know the books, and of course they've been kept absolutely straight.”
“Of course, sir.” Murdock placed the empty glass upon his tray and started to move off. The attorney stopped him once more and spoke in a lowered tone:
“Murdock, you've been a trusted employee of Broadlawns since it was built, and, if anything goes on at any time that strikes you as being—er—not quite regular, I shall appreciate your coming to me, as secretary, instead of first reporting the matter to the house committee, you understand?”
Murdock's face remained expressionless, but he responded with a shade more emphasis: “Perfectly, sir. I have heard of nothing irregular, and I am quite sure that there will be no difficulty about the books. Thank you, sir.”
This time he departed without further comment or instruction, but when he had disappeared Estridge glanced once more through the doorway into the office of the new secretary. The shock of sandy hair had been raised for an instant from above the ledger, and from behind a pair of heavy-rimmed glasses two shadowed, unexpectedly keen eyes seemed staring into his own.
CHAPTER II.
The Hornet's Nest
September had vanished in a burst of springlike warmth. October ushered in a period of premature, nipping frost which drove all but the hardiest of the golf players from the course and speedily turned the leaves of the trees about the clubhouse to the evanescent scarlet and gold of autumn.
The veranda was now practically deserted. Those of the all-year colony, who still forgathered at Broadlawns for tea and afternoon bridge, preferred the spacious entrance hall and dining room—the latter in reality a converted sun parlor. It was here that two feminine members of the club were lunching together one glowing day late in the month.
“This salad is atrocious!” The larger, more elderly of the two ladies shook her elaborately dressed gray head indignantly. “I am really tempted to lay the matter of the cuisine before the board! As it is I would have invited you to lunch at the house, Mrs. Dorrance, but I fancied we might pick up two people here for bridge later. Besides I am breaking in a new cook. You know what that means!”
“Indeed I do, my dear Mrs. de Forest!” the other replied. She was dark and beetle-browed, and an undeniable shadow appeared upon her firm upper lip. A tendency to embonpoint she curbed with obviously Spartan courage. Her one known act of self-indulgence had been her marriage to good-looking, penniless, weak Phil Dorrance, twelve years her junior. She had made him treasurer of the great Farr Rubber Company, and, although men looked with contempt upon him for the transaction, it was mingled with pity. For the “Empress Josephine,” as all Broadlawns called her behind her arrogant back, was no easy task mistress. “Our own cook left this morning, but Philip is bringing another out from town with him this afternoon.”
“I thought he was playing off his match with Ogden Bowles to-day,” Mrs. de Forest observed.
“No. I sent him in to Harlier's with ny emeralds; it occurred to me that I had better have the settings looked over before the Halloween dance to-morrow night.” Josephine Dorrance eyed her peach Melba and then pushed it resolutely from her. “You will wear your diamond necklace, of course?”
Mrs. de Forest shook her head, and her lips tightened. “No. With so many nouveau riche members coming into the club I decided that such a display, at a mere informal Hallowe'en affair, would be not only vulgar, but a bad example for Alice. Girls—especially those with no money of their own—do get such silly notions and expectations! You've no idea what it is to have a penniless, spoiled orphan niece on your hands!” Mrs. de Forest sighed. “I had hoped that Alice would be quite a help to me—a sort of social secretary, you know—but my poor sister-in-law indulged her so, and on positively nothing, my dear, that Alice takes everything quite for granted!”
The Farr rubber fortune was newer by two generations than the De Forest wealth, and Mrs. Dorrance quite enjoyed the sensation her emeralds always created at the club, especially among the lately admitted members. Therefore she raised her heavy brows slightly as she replied: “I don't believe you will be troubled with Miss Dare very long. That nice Landon boy who is visiting the Frasers”
“A mere bank employee of Rutherford Sowerby's!” Mrs. de Forest exclaimed. “I have forbidden Alice to have anything more to do with him than sheer courtesy demands. After all she is my niece, and I do not approve of even a wealthy, mature woman marrying an indigent upstart, much less an impressionable girl like Alice with her future before her. She will keep Gerald Landon in his place.” With this Parthian shot Mrs. de Forest led the way from the dining room.
At that very moment Alice Dare was having considerably more to do with the Landon boy than sheer courtesy demanded. As a matter of fact, she was seriously interfering with his driving of the Frasers' little runabout by cuddling her head into his shoulder, and Gerald Landon did not seem to object in the least. They were on a secluded road several miles from Broadlawns, making rapidly for a little, old fashioned village and a certain little old-fashioned cottage on its main street.
All at once Alice straightened in her seat and asked for the twentieth time: “Oh, do you think it will be all right, Gerald, darling?”
“Right as rain!” he responded promptly, avoiding a rut in the road by the narrowest margin.
“I don't know!” Alice replied. “There's just one person in that club whom I'll be afraid to face, and that person is the secretary. There's something odd about him, Gerald; I don't know whether it's that shaggy mop of hair that he peers out from beneath when he asks one of those funny, unexpected questions, or the way he stares after one. He's not disrespectful at all, nor even personal, and I can't say that I dislike him; he simply makes me uncomfortable. I wish I could see his eyes without that shade or those heavy-rimmed glasses.”
“Oh, he's just an old codger who has been in a rut always, dear, and country-club life is all new to him,” Gerald replied. “Jack Fraser seems to think he is clever.”
“So does Mr. Estridge and—and Mr. Sowerby,” Alice said in a lowered tone. “I've seen them talking to him a lot.”
“Well, I'm safe enough even if Sowerby has taken a queer fancy to him,” Gerald observed. “I'm not a member, you know, just a guest of the Frasers, and Grant only bothers with his club accounts and ledgers. Not a single one of the crowd will see us until we get back.”
But the young assistant cashier of Sowerby's bank was wrong. The solitary occupant of a big, high-powered car, coming down one of the side roads, had noted and recognized the couple in the little runabout, and he gazed after them speculatively as he swung his own machine back the way they had come, toward Broadlawns. When he neared the club, however, he made a detour down a winding byway that was known as the “Glen Road,” and here all thought of the other two was driven from his mind when he came upon a second couple.
These two people were as much engrossed with each other as the first pair had been, and they were equally oblivious to his proximity as he slowed down the car to make as little noise as possible in passing them. They were seated upon a rustic bench half hidden behind a rock; the man wore a dapper town suit and the woman was dressed in a blue sweater and sport skirt. Her ash-blond hair was conspicuously fluffy.
“Fools!” said the occupant of the big car as he turned out upon the highway again headed for the club. “Fools!”
An hour later Mrs. Jack Fraser emerged from the caddie house and started alone for the club veranda. She was a pretty little woman in the late twenties, with a sensible, humorous mouth, healthily tanned skin, and wind-blown brown hair, and she walked with a free, athletic stride devoid of swagger. As she neared the veranda steps she caught sight of Ogden Bowles and hailed him cordially.
“Jack and I have just been around,” she said. “It was such a gorgeous afternoon that I couldn't resist it, but I really meant to call on Mrs. Carter. I heard that she had been ill for the last few days, and, as a matter of fact, we've hardly seen her here at the club for the past month.”
Ogden Bowles hesitated, eying her frank, smiling countenance for a moment as though uncertain what to reply. Then he, too, smiled.
“I am sure that Mrs. Carter's indisposition is not serious. She has promised to come to the Halloween dance with me to-morrow night,” he replied. “Won't you come in and let me give you a cup of tea, Mrs. Fraser?”
“You come in and join us,” she suggested instead. “All the rest of the crowd are having tea in the foyer.”
The atmosphere seemed more chilly indoors than out in the sunshine, and a tiny fire had been started upon the hearth. Rutherford Sowerby had settled himself squarely before it, and Jack Fraser and Samuel Estridge stood with their elbows on the mantel, deep in conversation with him. The attorney appeared to have been remonstrating, but Sowerby was continuing to speak in a loud voice: “I don't care! I tell you something's got to be done. Here it's been more than a month since the affair happened, and what has been accomplished? Exactly nothing!”
“Look here, Rutherford, unless you want the unholy scandal that we've all been trying to avoid, you'll talk lower!” Estridge spoke in keen, incisive tones with a quick glance toward the bay window where Mrs. Fraser and Ogden Bowles had joined Mrs. de Forest and Mrs. Dorrance, and it was evident that a bridge game was being arranged. “We've taken the only possible step under the circumstances”
“Well, that step will have to lead somewhere during the next twenty-four hours, Sam, or that unholy scandal you are talking about is likely to spread through all creation!' The bank president's retort was made in a modulated voice. “It happened at the Harvest Dance, if you remember, and to-morrow night is Halloween. If the same thing or something like it occurs then we'll all be in a deuce of a hole!”
“But there are only a few of us who know, and we can all watch,” Jack Fraser suggested. He was as tanned and lithe and clear-eyed as his wife, but half a head taller, with a look of strength and purposefulness that told of a few added years and wider experiences. Just now his jaw was set, and his gray eyes were stern. “Don't think I'm not taking this seriously; the scandal of such a thing may mean mere notoriety for some of us, but actual ruin for the rest, particularly if the matter is never cleared up.”
“Cleared up!” exclaimed Sowerby. “It'll be cleared up, by gad, if every member of this club Oh, here's my wife!”
But Maud Sowerby, her fluffy, ash-blond hair slightly roughened by the wind, straightened her blue sweater and merely nodded to the group near the fireplace. Joining the others by the bridge table, she rang for the steward.
“I don't believe Murdock's in on the game, but we can't be too careful until we are sure,” Jack Fraser spoke in a voice which was scarcely above a whisper as the steward passed with a tea tray. “That's the worst of it! There are perhaps half a dozen of us, including some of the absent house committee, who know what happened, but there's just one member or employee of this club who knows how it happened, and we haven't the slightest clew to his or her identity.”
“IT should say we had too many!” Estridge said dryly. “I could have named at least three members of this club, on the very day that our investigation assumed a practical form, who to the trained eye gave every indication of guilt. Now it is manifestly impossible that they could have been in any conspiracy, and it is equally improbable that any of them had a hand in the affair. We'll have a merry dance to-morrow night if we who know continue to go about glaring at each other.”
“It'll be a merrier one if the Harvest affair is repeated!” remarked Sowerby. “Oh, I admit, Sam, that your plan was the only one we could follow under the circumstances, but we might have done ten times more with it as I contended from the beginning.”
“And put everybody in the club, members and employees alike, wise to what we were doing?” demanded Estridge. He lowered his arm from the mantel, straightened himself and added irrelevantly: “It is near the first of the month, and Grant must have begun to get his accounts ready to date so that he can add without trouble the little that will come in later. Think I'll go and have a look at them. Hello, Dorrance!”
But Philip Dorrance seemed not to have heard the greeting. He had just entered, clad not in his usual hectic sport regalia, but in one of the dapper business suits he was in the habit of wearing to the offices of the Farr Rubber Company. His insignificantly good-looking face was curiously white and set aS he made his way to the bridge table.
Mrs. Dorrance was dummy at the moment, and she glanced up expectantly from her outspread cards. “I thought you might have come out on an earlier train, Philip.” Her dominant, almost masculine, tones, carried to the farthermost corners of the foyer. “What did Harlier says about my emeralds?”
Dorrance moistened his lips nervously and shook his head. “You won't be able to wear them to-morrow night, my dear Josephine.” The reply came with his habitual, conciliatory, little cough. “You were right about the settings; they say at Harlier's that the whole collection must be thoroughly gone over.”
With a little exclamation of annoyance Mrs. Dorrance turned her attention once more to the game, and Jack Fraser remarked in an aside to Estridge, who had lingered: “So the Empress Josephine will have to appear without her crowning glory to-morrow night! Perhaps it is just as well. Do you know, I think, if it were not for disappointing my wife, and the fact that my brother is coming out, I'd stay in town myself and establish a perfectly good, indestructible alibi for the time of this Halloween Dance.”
“No, you don't!” declared Sowerby firmly. “We'll all stand or fall together, no matter what happens; that's agreed. By the way, do you mean that brother of yours from Texas?”
Fraser nodded, and Sowerby turned to Estridge.
“Ever meet him?” he asked. “He's an interesting chap; we've had dealings with him at the bank. He owns large oil interests down near the border. Older than you, isn't he, Jack? Does he still ride that hobby of his?”
Jack Fraser laughed. “Yes. Ralph is four years my senior, but he is still a perfect kid about collecting queer old weapons of all kinds, particularly firearms.” He, too, turned to the lawyer. “I'll be glad to have you meet him, for you may be interested in hearing him rave about his collection. He really has some of the most curious man-killing instruments, and not necessarily ancient either, that were ever devised by murderous-minded cranks. Heaven knows where he picks them up around the globe! But we were not discussing murder, thank goodness! At the worst we may be in for a scandal, though possibly a ruinous one.”
Samuel Estridge had nodded politely at the suggestion that he meet the younger man's brother, but there was a sudden tenseness of his easy pose, and the other two, following his gaze, saw that it was fixed upon the door of the house secretary's little box of an office. Philip Dorrance had strolled over to it with an elaborate air of unconcern and disappeared within, but, while the three men by the fireplace watched, he came hurriedly out again, and, fairly tumbling in his haste, made his way the veranda door and went out.
“By Jove, did you see that!” Fraser exclaimed beneath his breath. “I wonder if the little bounder has just discovered that he has overdrawn his allowance for this month and is afraid to tell his wife!”
“Murdock!” Sowerby called to the steward, who had paused a short distance away to remove some empty glasses. “Bring us three of those devitalized drinks of yours. Is Mr. Grant in his office?”
“Yes, sir. No, sir, Mr. Grant went out just a few minutes ago; I don't know where, sir.”
He glided noiselessly away upon his errand, and Sowerby turned to the others. “You see? Dorrance was trying to find Grant, not leaving him after an unsatisfactory interview. We're getting as gossipy as a pack of old women!”
The glances of Fraser and Estridge met, but they said nothing until the steward returned with three tall glasses upon a tray.
“Murdock”—it was the attorney who spoke—“do you recall a brief conversation I had with you on the first day that Mr. Grant took over his duties?”
The steward placed the glasses upon a table before he replied: “Yes, sir. I have given Mr. Grant all the assistance in my power, sir.”
“As I not only reminded you, but explained to him, you have been with the club a long time and are thoroughly familiar with the books,” Estridge pursued. “I have no doubt that Mr. Grant was glad to turn over a great many of the minor accounts to you?”
Although his last words were a statement the inflection made them so unmistakably a question that Murdock realized the need of a reply, yet once more he hesitated respectfully.
“Well, sir, I really didn't know all about the books, even in Mr. Martin's time, only the club accounts that have always been in my hands, and, since I am just the steward, I suppose Mr. Grant, being new, felt personally responsible. He—he seems to be very careful and conscientious I should say, sir.”
There was silence, save for an occasional murmur from the bridge players, as Murdock disappeared again within the pantry, but a moment later there came the rattle and clatter of a dropped tray.
“Confound that steward!” Sowerby slammed down his glass. “Did you hear that? No wonder Grant doesn't want him fussing about the books! He's getting more careless every day. I've always said it was a mistake to keep any club attendant too long!”
Samuel Estridge smiled. “I told you a little while ago that, on the very day our investigation assumed a practical form, I could have named three members of the club who gave every indication of separate guilt of some sort, or at least a guilty conscience. We were only looking for one, but I could now name at least five persons, any one of whom—if the other four were eliminated—might be seriously suspected. Gentlemen, do you know what our well-meant efforts have stirred up in this peaceful little community? A hornet's nest, and Heaven knows what will happen before we stamp it out!”
CHAPTER III.
Under the Dragon Lantern
Broadlawns was glowing with strings of varicolored lanterns. They were hung from tree to tree and hobbing grotesquely in the night wind which had turned soft and balmy with the fickle mellowness of coming Indian summer. Nearer the veranda the rows of motors, parked in a circle on the driveway, sent the glare of their lamps out into the darkness, and the clubhouse itself was ablaze with lights and throbbing with the syncopated melodies from the alternating string orchestra and jazz band.
The far corners of the veranda itself been left discreetly in shadow, with a bobbing lantern here and there, and, in the brief intervals between dances, fluffily gowned and somberly coated figures appeared for a time and then vanished again within doors, leaving only an occasional couple here and here, too absorbed to be aware that the music had started once more.
Toward the hour before midnight, however, the treacherous softness of the air sharpened, the wind veered to the north and rose, and the sting of frost drove even the hardiest and most persevering of the sentimental couples to the shelter of the conservatory. There, behind a bank of huge chrysanthemums, a dapper young man in faultless evening attire strove vainly to persuade a pretty, colorless, doll-like woman to seat herself on a rustic bench beside him.
“It's no use Dorry!” There was a note of pettishness in her voice. “I came because you said that you had something to tell me that I ought to hear, but please hurry! I can't stay a minute!”
“You've got to hear me out, Maud.” Phil Dorrance spoke with a strange doggedness, and there was an unusual light in his slightly prominent blue eyes. “You've played with me all summer, you've led me to believe that you were ready to chuck everything, and”
“I thought we had all this out yesterday on the Glen Road!” Maud Sowerby's tone were unmistakably cold now and contemptuous. “I played about with you simply because we were both bored, and you know it. I'm not going to stay here any longer and take the risk of being caught in a tête-à-tête with you, Dorry. I thought that what you had to say to me would be something new—something, perhaps, connected with my own protection and not your feelings.”
He winced at the palpable sneer, and the lips beneath his small mustache curled viciously. “Perhaps what I had to say concerned both, but, since you have become suddenly so discreet, I will not mention it. Shall I take you back now to your husband?”
She looked at him, and the sneer gave place to a whimper. “What is it, Dorry? Do you mean that we are both going to get into trouble? We've only carried on a mild sort of flirtation, as you know, but my husband is a brute, and your wife is a cat, and between them, if they wanted to, they might take from us all that we have gained by the years during which we have put up with them!” Her voice rose to a subdued wail. “I couldn't give up my lovely house and my car and my luxuries and go back to the typewriter again, I couldn't!”
“Suppose I hadn't taken it for a mild sort of flirtation?” Phil asked grimly. “Suppose I'd burned both our bridges? What then?”
Her anger flamed up anew. “You couldn't burn mine!” she declared through set teeth. “You haven't even a scrap Of a silly, sentimental note from me, and if you've gotten into any stupid mess no one can say I had anything to do with it. You have to get out of it the best way you can.”
“Is that your last word, Maud?” he demanded slowly, with a sort of deadly earnestness which came oddly from his weak, almost effeminate lips. “I warn you I am more desperate than you know. You meant that?”
“I did. I've been foolish, perhaps, but not wicked, and I intend to protect myself no matter what happens. Do you hear—no matter what happens!”
Phil Dorrance drew himself erect and bowed with a touch of real dignity. “Shall we return now to the ballroom? Under the circumstances, it would be useless for us to continue this conversation, and, as you say, a further tête-à-tête with me may prove a risk for you.”
She glanced at him for a moment in mute questioning, then shrugged and turned toward the door. Neither of them had noticed a younger couple who stole in almost guiltily and proceeded to the farther end of the conservatory. Strangely enough the girl's first words were suggestive of those of Maud Sowerby, but with a very different intonation.
“Oh, Gerald, we must hurry! We can't stay a minute! Auntie is holding court in her corner as usual, but, if she discovers that I'm in here with you after all her injunctions, there'll be a dreadful scene when we get home. How—how did Mr. Sowerby treat you at the bank to-day?”
“The same as usual—just as though I didn't exist.” Gerald Landon shrugged. “It is only out here, you know, dearest, that he grants me more than a passing nod. We're safe enough, Alice, darling.”
“Don't!” She shrank away from him. “Suppose somebody heard you call me that and told auntie, and she went to him! He doesn't like her, but you know what influence she has out here. If they both began investigating”
“There goes that beastly music, and I've got to haul Mrs. Dorrance around the floor!” Gerald said gloomily, then with a swift movement he gathered the girl into his arms.
She yielded to his kiss, but the next instant she freed herself and placed a flowering shrub between them. “Gerald! How could you! Some one might have seen! There's something strange going on, I know it! Something that we don't understand, but it frightens me! Did you see that notice on the bulletin board outside the billiard room, that any member or guest of the club, desiring to leave before the final dance, would kindly see Mr. Estridge first? I have heard heaps of people discussing it. Do you suppose it means a special meeting of some kind? That Mr. Grant isn't in his office to-night!”
“I couldn't help it, Alice. No one saw, and I don't know why you keep bothering about that house secretary. The last I saw of him he was standing right under the dragon lantern on the veranda, right in front of that wide window which faces across the foyer to the stairs and the two little offices—his and Murdock's—on either side of the balustrade. He was watching the dancing, and I felt kind of sorry for him, poor chap, being out of it all. And don't you worry your darling little head about old Estridge and his bulletins; there never was a house committee on a country club yet that didn't try to show its importance on every possible occasion. If it had been anything serious Jack Fraser would have told me about it, since he put me up here. But we must hurry! Here comes Ralph Fraser for you now.”
Jack Fraser's brother, from Texas, of whom he and Rutherford Sowerby had spoken on the previous day, was a big, broad-shouldered man of thirty-five. His bluff, hearty, outspoken manner hinted at one who knew more of boom towns than ultra-smart suburban colonies, and his keen eyes took in the situation between the two at a glance.
“Look here, Miss Dare, if I'm butting in we'll just forget all about this dance,” he began. “I'm rotten at it, anyhow—can't lift my hulking feet off the floor.”
“Oh, no!” It was Gerald who spoke, but Alice had seized upon the newcomer almost feverishly. She feared that he had divined their attachment and might blurt out to others that an engagement existed between them. Gerald added hurriedly: “I have this dance with Mrs. Dorrance, and was only waiting until you came for Miss Dare. See you both later!”
He bowed, and then fairly bolted from the conservatory. In addition to the ballroom the great, round entrance hall had been given over to the dancers, forcing the “old guard” to the billiard room except for one corner, where Mrs. de Forest sat majestically with a group of sycophants and social climbers about her.
Gerald noted with relief that she was still there and holding forth to those who seemingly hung upon her words; then he turned to survey the scene for the partner for whom he had come so tardily. Phil Dorrance came hurriedly up to him.
“I say, old man, have you seen anything of that chap Grant? He's not in his office.
“He's out on the veranda there, I believe,” Gerald added with hasty mendacity: “I've been looking everywhere for your wife; I have this dance with her, but I can't find her.”
“Can't you?” Phil responded nervously in an absent tone, and the other noticed all at once how haggard he seemed to have grown. “I haven't looked her up myself since my last dance with her an hour ago, but I suppose you'll find her around here somewhere. Grant is on the veranda, you say?”
Without waiting for a reply, he was off, while Gerald gazed after him for a moment in amazement. What could have been the matter with Dorrance? There had been an air of suppressed excitement and strained anxiety about him; such as he had observed on men during a run on the bank. This troubled mien was utterly foreign to Dorrance's usual complacently self-satisfied attitude. And what could he want with Grant? The house secretary's office always remained closed during a dance or other festivity, the steward attending to anything necessary from his own office.
Gerald glanced toward it across the hall on the other side of the staircase and saw Murdock seated behind his desk. The steward was watching the dancers from beneath respectfully lowered eylids. Why hadn't Dorrance gone to Murdock if he had wanted anything?
At that moment Mrs. Dorrance came down the staircase and approached him. “So sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr. Landon,” she murmured, forestalling the apology which Gerald himself had been about to make. “Such a stupid accident! I had to have my gown mended. Mr. Bowles is usually a perfect dancer, but he must have an attack of nerves or something to-night. We were passing that open window there, where the dragon lantern is swinging outside, when he stumbled and his foot caught in my skirt. Of course I don't like to say anything, but I think the use to which the men put their lockers these days is a disgrace to the club.”
“Shall we dance?” Gerald asked diplomatically. “Elsie—Mrs. Fraser—told me that Mr. Bowles was bringing Mrs. Carter to the dance to-night. Have you seen her?'
“Yes.” Mrs. Dorrance moved heavily off in step with him, carefully conserving her breath. “She must have been really ill. I thought it a pose—didn't bother to call—but she looks like a ghost. Red-headed women always need high color, or low lights.”
Midnight was approaching and the scurrying waiters were adding the last touches to the supper tables in the restaurant. It had become the custom of the club, since the war, to hold an ordinary informal dance on this evening. Previously it had been given over to a masked ball which was rivaled in gayety only by the ante-bellum Election Night and New Year's Eve affairs. Now, exactly at midnight, all the lights were to be extinguished except a swinging lantern or two outside, and, although no appropriate toast could be drunk, a simple song of long ago would be sung by the assembled company in memory of those who would return no more to Broadlawns. Supper would follow, and then dancing would be resumed for an hour or two, but the fun would be more subdued, and the party break up long before the dawn.
More than one pair of eyes sought the tall clock in the corner as the witching hour approached. A tall, willowy woman, who entered from the ballroom, leaning on Ogden Bowles' arm, looked solicitously in the direction of the clock. Her face was waxen, and her large, topaz-glinting eyes were deeply circled by not unbecoming blue shadows.
“Perhaps I should not have urged you to dance,” the broker murmured solicitously as she paused, swaying for a moment with one hand at her slim throat. “I hope it did not tire you too much. Shall we sit out the rest in the conservatory?”
Mrs. Carter shook her head, and hand slipped down and rested upon her breast as she replied: “No, thanks, I am not tired, but just a little dizzy, I think. Let us go out to the veranda for a few minutes and get a breath of air.”
“You won't take cold?” he asked. “Can't I get your wrap for you? You left it in the downstairs cloak room, I think.”
“If you will be so good.” She smiled faintly at him. “I will wait for you in the conservatory.”
Yet, when he had departed upon his errand, Mrs. Carter waited only until he had disappeared, then moved swiftly over to the entrance door and out into the chilly obscurity of the veranda. At first she blinked in the sudden transition from the brilliantly lighted foyer and could see nothing but the faint, swaying blur of the lanterns. Then she beheld a stocky, bareheaded figure with a shock of heavy hair standing over the railing with his back to her.
Save for his presence,the veranda was deserted, and Mrs. Carter halted, but at that moment the music of the one-step ceased, and the grunch of footsteps on the gravel of the driveway was plainly audible. She moved over noiselessly to the railing, and had almost reached the unconscious figure before she spoke: “Good evening, Mr. Grant.”
“Ah, Mrs.—er—Carter!” The house secretary turned deferentially and peered at her through his heavy-rimmed glasses as he bowed. “I had heard some of the other members say that you were ill, but I am glad that your indisposition has passed.”
“Thank you,” she responded quietly. “It was nothing serious. Ever since I came North again to live I have found the first change from summer to autumn very trying, but I have no doubt I shall grow accustomed to it in time.”
“You have lived in the Southwest?” he asked quickly.
“No, in North Carolina.” She spoke with a trace of surprise in her well-bred, level tones, and in the shadow the hand upon her breast tensed suddenly and then dropped to her side. “What part of the Southwest were you told that I came from, Mr. Grant?”
“No one has mentioned your name, Mrs. Carter. When you spoke of coming North again I thought instinctively of Dallas, Texas. You were not there by any chance about three years ago?”
“I have never been in Texas in my life.' Mrs. Carter laughed in half-bored amusement, but her laughter ended in a little shiver as a cutting sweep of the night breeze sent the dry leaves eddying along the drive. “Did you fancy that you had seen me there, or some one, perhaps, of the same name? I do not think my late husband had any connections in Dallas.”
“No.” Mr. Grant shook his head. “It was not the name, although that of the lady you resemble sounded very like yours. I saw her under circumstances which tended to impress her upon my memory, and, if you will pardon me for being personal, Mrs. Carter, when I first saw you here at the club it was as though she herself had walked into my little office.”
“How interesting!” Mrs. Carter laughed again with a slight note of irony and turned as Ogden Bowles emerged upon the veranda with her wrap. “I would feel more curiosity as to the identity of this mysterious double of mine, Mr. Grant, were she not about the fiftieth of whom I have been told. There must be something about auburn hair which makes all its possessors seem akin.”
“If I dared I should scold you for coming out here without waiting for your cape, Mrs. Carter!” There was playful concern in Ogden Bowles' tone. “I looked for you in the conservatory, but found no one there except little Miss Dare and Ralph Fraser. Evening, Grant!”
The house secretary returned the salutation, and then, as the music started again, he moved away and took up his stand once more in the window beneath the dragon lantern.
Mrs. Carter, instead of permitting her escort to place her wrap about her shoulders, took it from him and laid it over her arm.
“You would rather dance?” Bowles asked. “This is the last before midnight, you know, but I did not think you felt up to it.”
“I don't.” Mrs. Carter smiled wanly. “You'll forgive me, won't you, if I run away to the dressing room upstairs and rest for a few minutes? I'll join you in the foyer after the singing is over and the lights go up.”
“As my lady pleases,” he replied with a daringly tender note in his tones, “You will find me waiting for you at the foot of the stairs.”
At the moment before the music struck up Ralph Fraser, in the conservatory, was asking in a curiously detached tone: “Who is the Mrs. Carter for whom Mr. Bowles was inquiring just now? I don't believe I have met her.”
“She's that tall, awfully pretty, red-haired woman he brought to the dance to-night,” Alice Dare replied. “Surely you must have seen her; she is so striking looking that she quite puts every one else in the shade, although she never seems to make the slightest effort to do so.”
“So she is Mrs. Carter.” Fraser paused and then added: “I noticed her when they came, but only because there seemed to be something oddly familiar about her that I couldn't place. Is she a resident of the neighborhood?”
“Yes. She came from the South somewhere about two years ago and purchased the Horton cottage. Don't you think the way she wears her hair drawn over her ears makes her look positively saintly?' Alice demanded with girlish enthusiasm. “Not another woman at Broadlawns would dare attempt it! I think that is one reason why they are catty to her—all except Mrs. Jack Fraser—but she is so sweet she never seems to notice it. Oh, here comes your brother for me now, and you have this dance with Mrs. Jack, haven't you?”
Gerald Landon, having thankfully relinquished Mrs. Dorrance to her husband, appeared hopefully in the door of the conservatory. As Alice passed with Jack Fraser she gave him the coolest of little nods, conscious that her aunt's sharp eyes were upon her from her stronghold in the corner of the foyer.
Gerald hovered disconsolately in the doorway, and once again his gaze traveled idly out over the scene. The orchestra jazzed its maddest melody, and the hands of the tall clock crept nearer, minute by minute, to twelve. Waiters still dodged hurriedly between the dancers. With the final articles for the supper room; Murdock, the steward, had risen behind his desk and was reaching over with a golf stick or cane as though to intercept one of them; all at once the merry pandemonium ceased abruptly in the middle of a bar, the laughing, chattering voices died, and in the sudden silence the silvery chimes of midnight sounded from the clock. As they rang out upon the stillness the lights dimmed to a dull orange glow, and with the twelfth note they went out. Only the weird glimmer of the dragon lantern on the veranda lighted the scene. The dancers stood motionless, and softly there pulsed out upon the air the throbbing tones of the violins in the first notes of “Auld Lang Syne.”
Gently, with the tenderness of reminiscence, voices took it up here and there, swelling as they were gradually augmented by others in the well-known refrain:
“'Should auld acquaintance be forgot'”
A sharp report crackling across the foyer brought the music to an abrupt halt. Almost with it a woman screamed, and then there came a choking cry and a hideous, slithering sound, followed by a heavy thud from somewhere outside.
“Lights!” Ralph Fraser's quick, authoritative tones broke the instant of strained silence, and, after a fumbling interval, the foyer and then the whole lower floor of the clubhouse burst into effulgence.
That broke the tension, and every one crowded eagerly forward in the wake of Ralph Fraser, who had started for the veranda from the direction from which the cry and dull sound of a fall had come. But, in advance of all the others, Samuel Estridge passed Mrs. Carter, where she had halted at the foot of the staircase. The steward bent for a moment beneath his desk, and then vaulted over it as the attorney reached the veranda door.
After one look Estridge turned to Ralph Fraser, at his elbow. “Back!” he exclaimed. “Keep the women back!”
But it was late. The outrush had been too strong to be stemmed, and men and women together swarmed out upon the veranda. Beneath the dragon lantern, before the open window which looked in upon the foyer, something lay stretched full length upon the floor. It was a man's stocky form, and there seemed something strangely familiar and yet unfamiliar about it. He was obviously a young man, in his thirties, with wide-open, staring dark eyes and sleek black hair. Under the swaying light of the lantern it seemed that he leered horribly at them.
“Who is it? What has happened him?” a voice demanded sharply. And then they all saw.
Beside the still head there lay a crushed and twisted pair of heavy-rimmed glasses and a wig of coarse, sandy hair, while upon the breast a splotch of crimson had widened slowly, and a tiny rivulet trickled down it to the floor.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Samuel Estridge turned to the huddled, horror-stricken group behind him, “it is the man whom you knew as James Grant, our recently acquired house secretary. He has been shot!”
To be continued in next week's issue of DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE.